Ian McKellen: Alec Guinness Didn’t Want Me To Speak Out On Gay Rights

Sir Ian McKellen has said that his decision to speak out on issues surrounding LGBTQ+ community rights wasn’t always met with the most positive of reactions from his peers in the entertainment industry.

During a recent interview with The Guardian, Sir Ian was asked about the “worst piece of advice” that he’d ever been given, and recalled a time around the late 1980s or early 1990s when the late Star Wars actor Sir Alec Guinness invited him out for dinner.

“We chatted about this and that until he brought up the real reason for his invitation,” the Lord Of The Rings star explained.

“He had heard about my work to establish Stonewall – a lobby group to present to the government and the world at large the case for treating UK lesbians and gays equally under the law with the rest of the population.”

Sir Ian continued: “He thought it somewhat unseemly for an actor to dabble in public or political affairs and advised me, sort of pleaded with me, to withdraw. Advice from an older generation, which I didn’t follow.”

Following his death in August 2000, three different biographies alleged that Sir Alec was bisexual, but chose not to come out publicly in his lifetime.

Sir Ian admitted during his Guardian interview that he was reminded of his dinner with the late Oscar winner while watching a production of the show Two Halves Of Guinness, which he described as “a solo show which hints at Sir Alec’s latent bisexuality in a way that would have upset him, I suppose – Zeb Soanes’ immaculate impersonation notwithstanding”.

The six-time Olivier recipient – currently on the promo trail for his new movie The Christophers – came out as gay in 1994, and has continued to speak out on behalf of the LGBTQ+ community since.

In 2024, he told HuffPost UK of the current issues facing transgender people: “When society disregards a minority – and, worse than that, imposes laws and restrictions on their behaviour, which is really unfair – then that’s when society is going off the rails, and we have to attend to it.”